The Canaribou and the Falconary

A mother canaribou intercepts an attack on her youngster by a giant falconary.

~~~

The canaribou is a large serilope that lives in enormous migratory herds just past the tree line on the northern tundra of Striata. It is one of the larger serilopes of the early Cryocene, weighing as much as one thousand pounds, and is a generalized herbivore that consumes whatever hardy vegetation can survive the harsh polar winters in this region - mainly moss, lichen, and short, hardy grasses and herbs in summer and pineflower needles and cones in winter (being one of only a few birds able to digest this very coarse and bitter food source) - all of which it crops up with a small beak and chews with grinding motions of its hard, "tooth-edged" tongue before swallowing in a mouth lined with fleshy cheeks. Canaribou live in herds of several million, moving southwards into the pineflower forests when winter it as its worst and moving closer to the pole during summer, when the southern areas of the large arctic circle thaw for a few weeks or months. The canaribou is among the most advanced of the vivas and has begun to evolve a two-chambered digestive system to get the most out of their diet, which is mostly roughage. Food is quickly chewed and swallowed into the crop, which has become a second stomach of sorts and with powerful grinding motions, with the aid of gastroliths, continues to masticate the vegetation into a slurry which is then more easily digested by the true stomach and long intestine.

Canaribous are also ahead of most other aardgeese of the era in perfecting the practice of incubating their eggs internally. Because of the extremely cold temperatures in the Serinan tundra by the Cryocene, if a canaribou is to breed it has to begin as early as possible. So cold is the climate the canaribou has adapted to survive in, however, that even if the mother keeps her egg inside her for all but a few hours before it hatches, if there is nowhere clear of snow to lay her egg when it does need to hatch, even a few minutes on the ice can kill the unborn chick. The canaribou overcomes this threat entirely by withholding its egg even as it begins to hatch. The muscles of the oviduct are now particularly powerful and mobile enough to eject the shell fragments without their causing any harm to the mother's internal anatomy, and the chick is kept warm throughout the process while the mother beds down in a thicket out of predator's sights. It is therefore the first truly live-bearing bird, giving birth to a fully hatched infant and never incubating an egg outside its body. By squeezing the egg methodically with the muscles of the oviduct the mother canaribou can also assist in cracking the eggshell to hasten the process, making its young be one of the quickest birds to hatch - the whole process is usually completed in an hour or two. The calves are born in the early spring, just before the tundra thaws, and are fed with a fatty milk secretion from their mother's crop stomach until the snow melts enough to let the calves begin to forage for themselves. During the intermediate time, however, the mother is usually not feeding much either, for she must constantly stay near her newborn chick to keep it warm in its tender first days, and instead relying on fat reserves to produce the food for her young.

Even after they can feed themselves the young canaribou require significant protection for their first year from predators, being small and defenseless. Mothers are highly aggressive during this time, driving away any creature - no matter how seemingly small or harmless - that comes too close to their offspring, even larger predatory birds such as pack-hunting banshees or giant falconaries that glide silently over the tundra in the summer in search of a lost calf to snatch up.

Some of the falconaries found across Serina in the Cryocene exhibit wingspans of more than twenty feet, gliding high on thermals and crossing entire continents, even seas, in their hunts.